ROLE:
Product Designer
Design Researcher
Iterator
Brainstormer
Problem: Companies do not fully utilize the knowledge force within their organizations.
I worked at OnFrontiers for 10 months and was unfortunately laid off due to the economic climate in March 2023. I worked with one other designer to develop an internal knowledge search engine that specialized within the federal government. This project was highly complex because trying to design for “what knowledge looks like” varied from person to person.
I conducted user interviews and iterated the early stages of the search engine. Once we launched our beta, we revisited, wireframes and prototyped our higher fidelity designs in order to set up our developers for success.
At my time at OnFrontiers, we had to start completely from scratch for basically every single flow we encountered. But, that was what was so fun about it. I was able to define the flow, persona, wireframe then I got to get into the edge cases. What if _____? What happens when?
This screen above is one of the final flows and executions I was lucky enough to work on, where an individual had to add a new experience that we could not pull from our data. The big question was, how can we get the user to want to input all the details and how intuitive can we make it?
The Old/Beginning
We were given an old template that was pretty half baked but that meant we got to start with a loose idea of the end goal. I prefer to start with hand sketches because I believe it removes a lot of the friction and simply allows me to get my ideas out.
Knowledge Profile
The Knowledge Profile is an ongoing project. It took us a while to iron out every single section but this feature will keep evolving as the existing team gets user feedback. This section is so important because the information displayed here has to be easily digestible so that an external reviewer can decide if the profile is a good fit or not within 5 - 10 seconds.
We had to figure out a way to show expertise level within the organization without the labels because users found them confusing. By using icons and color differentiation, we were able to convey how much knowledge an individual held within their organization within a certain topic. A view could also click into a topic above to filter out the chart below.
Success states and fail states were a huge part of the process of adding a new experience and deleting them. I created the graphic states that would tell the user that their profile was updating.
Flows
One of my strong suits is able to create user flows and integrate on them quickly. I created the majority of the user flows that my design partner and I used to create the high fidelity prototypes
delete flow
Search
… this was doozy. We started designing the search function before we even knew what our data was capable of. I had to make a lot of assumptions based on parameters that were constantly changing. Search evolved 3 - 4 times during my stint at OnFrontiers and I had a blast iterating on it.
Search Thumbnails
These were a really fun challenge due to the fact that the search parameters were changing and we didn’t fully know what we could search individuals by initially.
The search operated more like a filtering mechanism, since we were just sorting through individuals within the companies system. We wanted to encourage people to refine the search by adding multiple filters to see how close our system could get to finding their “unicorn”.
In terms of the filter bar, I chose to stick to standard conventions since the rest of the system is new to the user. I wanted to ensure that the user could successful search/filter and find what they are looking for.
Collections
Upon interviewing individuals over the summer, I realized that most people kept an Excel sheet of their network and OnFrontiers was trying to be a one-stop-shop for this organization. Collections came about to replace Excel in their work flow and hopefully preserve these networks of individuals even after the employee, who made it, left the organization.
Collections did not get the love it deserved but it was next on my to-do list prior to me getting laid off *sigh*
Analytics
This is a future design for the company. I was tasked with making analytics platform within our system in order to show the future benefits of this system and how we could visualize their currently unused data to make it an asset.
